


Rosehip Tea

by ahandfulofstars



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: F/F, Gem War, Implied Rose Quartz/Greg Universe, Non-Linear Narrative, Past Pearl/Rose Quartz (Steven Universe)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-15
Updated: 2018-12-15
Packaged: 2019-09-19 15:59:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17004684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ahandfulofstars/pseuds/ahandfulofstars
Summary: And just as Pink Diamond had shed her nobility, her prestige, to become something better, Rose has given herself up, has become something that can change and grow. She has become like her flowers. She has become like the earth.Pearl wonders if she’s happy, in there.





	Rosehip Tea

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Rose asks her, holding up a peony in her palm. Pearl comes closer, notes those paper thin petals on Rose’s hands-- quartz hands, tough and wide and calloused, even. She lifts her own, fragile, and carries the flower when Rose lets it slip into her hands. “Nothing on homeworld could be so lovely-- look at it. No concern for geometry at all!” 

“No, no, Rose, this is a golden ratio! This flower is as geometric as anything, if--,” Pearl runs a hologram over the peony, slightly misaligned by nanometres, “--if imperfectly.”

She’s laughing. Rose is laughing, and the hologram glitches out as Pearl looks up into round cheeks and full lips, pink curls, strong shoulders-- the projection dissolves in her hands. 

“Imperfectly, my Pearl. That’s the beauty of it, isn’t it? They’re all imperfect, all in their different ways, and they’re all unique-- like-- like the amethysts that come out in slightly different shades, or the off-colours. The small ones of the pack.” Her voice is gentle as she sits down in the field, her eyes closed. “They’re all coming together, blooming. Isn’t it wonderful, my Pearl?” 

“It is,” Pearl admits. The flower’s petals bunch up in the middle, crowded around its sweet nectar, before they burst out into the world, reaching out into the hot summer air (this planet can swelter, Pearl knows, so unlike the barren outer moon she was made on.) When she looks back to Rose-- her diamond-- her Rose-- the flowers around her wind in, growing into her open palms with ease, with want to be closer. Pearl kneels, follows them as they climb around Rose and her kind, shining love, like the brilliance of her gem, like the catch of her tears. 

“Oh, Rose, don’t cry,” Pearl tells her, fingers up, hesitating, hovering above Rose’s cheek. Rose opens her eyes and Pearl draws back. “Look-- look at the peonies.”

Rose turns, tears drying, to look at the field around her, and her mouth opens into an _oh._ “I didn’t know these plants could move.”

“They shouldn’t,” Pearl says, and she places the peony back on the ground. “You made them.”

“I did?”

“You did.” There is a turn to Pearl’s smile. “It’s like they heard you.”

Rose picks up the flower by Pearl’s side and brings it close to her lips. She whispers to it, “You’re beautiful, little flower. You are marvelous.”

It’s Pearl’s turn to laugh into her thin hands, under that sea blue-green blush, but Rose shows no signs of pulling away. 

 

_Rose._ Rose Quartz, she tells her diamond. Pearl knows there are hundreds being made in the alpha kindergarten, popping out with those big mops of pale peach hair and gems so like their diamonds-- made in her image, her heralders. Pearl is enamoured with them, from the holograms she can see: their swords and shields and battle axes, their quartz headstrong passion, their programmed penchant for sacrifice. 

 

“I wannit!” Steven yells, his little stubby legs toddling to the sticky sweet and melting ice cream in Pearl’s hands. His hands curl around Pearl’s calves, and he looks up with tears in his eyes spilling out. Pearl wonders if she should bottle them but she thinks Garnet would disapprove. She lifts the ice cream up further, trying to ignore the cold spill of it over her knuckles. 

“It’s not healthy,” she tells Steven. “That vidalia said one is enough.”

He lets go, arms crossed, pout at his lips. His shirt rides up and Pearl is caught by that familiar shine of her gem--

“I wannit! I wannit now!” 

His leg comes up in a stomp, and the thing begins to slip from Pearl’s fingers, sliding, sliding, ridge by waffle cone ridge. It falls onto the ground with a crack, splitting onto the hot tarmac, and Greg comes running from behind his van. 

“Sorry!” he says, picking up Steven in his arms as the child begins to cry, “Sorry! He’s not usually like this, but the summer heat and all,” Greg laughs, nervous, at the blank look in Pearl’s eyes. “Uh-- should I-- should we leave? If you don’t want to look after him.”

Pearl blinks. His hair is growing in tufts, coarse strands wrapping together fluffed up. It’s black. It’s a blessing.

“No,” Pearl tells them, and she looks past the flashing car wash sign to the temple, where Amethyst had run to get one of those baby bonnets from her room, “No. Amethyst is coming back soon. I can get him another ice milk, if that will stop his crying.”

 

There is nothing on that desolate moon base, so Pearl takes up a little garden, clumped up in its soil and stored away in a bubble so the flowers might grow, placed carefully in her gem. After yellow diamond and her Pearl (smug, bragging, looking down her nose but she doesn’t know, doesn’t have that same nebulous, hopeful thing inside her) warp back to their latest beryl planet, Pearl brings it out, and it is withered, in the cold and empty of her gem. It comes out brittle and crumbles at Pearl’s gentle touch when she tries to hold it up to the thin starlight. 

 

Seven, Greg tells her: Steven is seven years old. He’s still so small, barely coming up to her waist when she’s kneeling down, but he is sweeter than before, brighter. He pads over to his sleeping bag on the edge of the exposed warp pad, but the wind is blowing so harsh for early October, and Pearl has heard of humans dying from chill, so she bundles him up and takes him into her temple room, careful he doesn’t wriggle out as she places him at the edge of the pools. 

“This is the inside of the temple?” he asks, all the wonder tamped by his need for an afternoon nap. 

“It’s my room,” Pearl corrects, testing the water to make sure it’s set to shallow. 

“It’s so big.”

“It’s a metaphysical space and isn’t truly made of matter as humans imagine it, therefore it cannot be _big._ ”

“It looks big,” Steven replies, huddling closer into his bag. “Can you sing me a song?”

“A song?”

“To help me go to sleep. Dad does it sometimes.”

“A lullaby?”

“Yeah.”

Pearl sits down beside him, knees to her chest. She looks up from the reflected stars in her water and says, “Rose used to sing them to Amethyst, and before she realised that-- well. She wanted to sing them to you. She had a list of all of them she wanted to teach you.”

“Mom?” 

Closing her eyes, Pearl imagines the flutter of her white dress, her wild pink mane, the moonlight glancing off her gem. When she opens them, Steven is watching the faded blue hologram, rapt.

“Yes, your mother. Rose Quartz.”

All the hologram does is blow wind, a looping projection she’s memorized and replayed thousands of times-- Rose’s still figure dances in earth’s fresh gale, giving an excited glint to her eyes. She’s beaming. She’s radiant. 

“Oh.” His eyes are half lidded though his hand is stretching out. Steven yawns, and then he is content to curl up. “What was she like?” he asks. 

“Rose?” Pearl’s mouth is bitter the same time she wants to laugh so hard she’ll cry. What was Rose like? After millenia Pearl is not sure if she has yet figured out through everything Rose has said and done and breathed life into what or why or how she is. How she was. “She was-- she was bright. She loved life on Earth and she loved her life on Earth. She loved you very much, Steven. She loves you, rather.”

“But she’s not here.”

The heel of Pearl’s hand comes up to wipe away her wet eyes. 

“Isn’t she?” Pearl asks, but Steven is already asleep. 

 

In the night, Pearl lays her arms out on the bed and her head down on them. She is flanked by Rose’s lion, docile. His mane bursts out into the still air, puffing up like Pink’s used to. She reaches a hand out, and, with caution, Lion noses the heel of her palm. She strokes a thumb against his muzzle, watching him watch her with those wide eyes, and withdraws. 

She listens to the rise and fall of Steven’s breathing.

 

Her lips are open in suggestion, pale sea blue bunched up in the valley corners of her mouth. She had tried to reform with more human features, this time-- loose lips and small eyelashes peeking out from the corners of her eyelids, everything her form could manage. 

“Are you sure about this?” Rose asks. Her hands settle around the nape of Pearl’s neck, brushing against the feather-soft of her hair. “You’ve never much liked how human mouths work.”

“It’s just a touch, right?” Pearl asks. 

“Just a touch,” Rose agrees. “Closed lips, if you want.”

“What do you want?” 

“I want what _you_ want, my Pearl.”

She’s never quite understood the wide-mouthed blood-leaking sweat-glistening world of humans. The closest two beings could be is with the holding of a gem, with the light melding of fusion. It is clean. It is divine. There is no messy physicality. So, when Pearl tilts her head up to Rose’s waiting face, her lips remain closed. They touch Rose’s manufactured warmth, bask in the floral scent she takes care to keep around her form.

Chaste, fulfilled, when Pearl draws back there is no flush on her face, no desire to do it again, but Rose’s eyes are wide and starry, arms wrapped around Pearl’s bony shoulders and shaking with suppressed laughter, with joy just about to break free. 

“What a wonderful planet this is,” she says. 

 

She hears Rose approach, the smooth sway of her spathe-like dress, before she sees her. The night is dark above them and these newly-learned stars offer little light on their own. 

"We've been looking for you," Rose tells her, sitting down with her knees bent, calves spread and disappearing under her skirts. "We hadn't heard from you in years."

Years, Pearl thinks. Years, not months or weeks or days-- battles could have been fought across continents, gems might have reformed and reshaped dozens of times, lives might be lost and lives might be hard-won-- or maybe not. Maybe it would have taken longer, now that the war has left this planet empty, in disrepair. It might have been years but Pearl pays little attention to time, these days. 

"You're looking at the stars?" 

Rose turns away from the halved strawberries and scuffed ground that are ample evidence to something far less poetic, far less peaceful. Pearl might feel bad, looking at the worried turn of Rose's brow, but this land has feasted on her fallen friends-- their fallen friends-- and borne transient fruit, red and fleshy like the insides of a human (Pearl wishes she did not have to know) that will wither away come the dry season. Oh, she believes in Earth; she’ll admit value enough in the tenacious beings that it has nurtured that she wouldn’t have them wiped out by colonization. She believes in the principles of this wild place: freedom and unbounded love and the terrifying reality of chance. She believed enough to be willing to pay such a price as those numerous rubies and amethysts and rutiles had, enough that she would charge into battle as Rainbow Quartz ready to sacrifice herself and Rose with her. 

She believed. She believes. But maybe some of her was caught up in that whirlwind, too. 

Rose's eyes are on her, weighty with expectation (this is why she had left to be alone but she was not meant to be alone-- she is a Pearl, some part of her whispers, and she is lost.) 

“It takes a long time to chart them.”

Rose barely smiles in answer before she rushes out of her mouth, “I'm sorry, Pearl. this was my fault.”

“And it was your doing. Now-- now Garnet can live as herself, right? No more fighting wars, and you can be you, how you want to be, and I-- I can be free. We have the earth to ourselves.”

“And all the rest of us can’t tell.” 

Pearl raises her arm, and as Rose curls in on herself, she places it gentle over those wide shoulders. 

“We couldn’t have known.” 

Rose shakes her head. Her tears spill out like from the mouth of a river and wet the ground, willing it to life again. It’s cruel. It’s cruel that they’ve made it so Rose has to suffer to fix anything, that she has to feel so powerless before she can help. 

“We couldn’t have known, Rose, and would you have let them destroy Earth if we did? Would you have let Garnet be shattered, or-- or let us continue as we were?”

Rose breathes in, sniffling. The river runs dry, and both of them sit in the desolate prairie wind. 

"It's such a quiet night, my Pearl.” Rose’s eyes glow but from which reflected light Pearl cannot say. “Tell me what you've been doing, all these years away."

Come home, Pearl hears, as she takes the offered spot under Rose's arm, pressed against her chest. Bright pink curls wrap around her, comforting, and she decides: yes. She tells Rose about the places she has documented, valleys and mountains untouched by humans, and in the tone of her voice seeps in her answer: I will. I will. I will come home. 

 

The beach is washed pale blue in the moonlight. It looks so bright, from down here. Pearl huddles closer into herself as she hears Rose come up behind her. She’s angry, maybe, or sad. She’s not ready to talk to Rose at the same time she wants to cleave to those wide arms and soft chest, to be with her so desperately.

They’re going to start trying in a week. Rose has her womb shaped and set, has been reading over medical texts for months making sure this can work, and they’re going to try for the baby in a week. 

She comes down beside Pearl, letting her legs into the water, too. Does she know? Pearl wonders. This lapping, this back and forth of the salt ocean, wraps Pearl up, was her first memory and her only memory for decades. How things have changed, and if she could go back and cradle that newly made Pearl and bubble it up, stop it from blossoming out, from forming--

Pearl closes her eyes. 

No. She has memories glowing bright enough, cutting deep enough, that she would protect them. She would keep them. Sometimes when she reforms she will spend hours wrapped up in those idyllic first days on earth, just her and Rose and the verdant life laid out for both of them to explore. She thinks of how the sun was, back then, how vibrantly blue the Earth’s skies seemed. 

“My Pearl,” Rose says. She is heavy with the weight of the night. “Since-- Since I’ll be holding another life in me, soon, I don’t know if I could change it. I don’t know what the stress might do to this form.”

“You’re used to holding it, aren’t you?” Pearl asks, eyes trained on the far off horizon. “You haven’t reverted for millenia.”

“I have,” Rose confesses, and Pearl laughs, muffling it with the back of her hand. She thinks it would fly up to her mouth, anyway. 

“Of course.” 

As long as she does it alone, Pearl supposes, Pink Diamond does not exist to the world, anymore. Pink Diamond does not exist to Pearl. 

“You think the baby will come out with your gem the wrong way?” Pearl asks. 

“I don’t know. I don’t know if they’ll come out with diamond eyes or neon pink skin. I don’t know if you’ll be free.”

“But you’re going to do it anyway.”

Rose nods. 

“I can’t ask why, can I?”

“You’ve already asked before.” 

“What’s it going to be like?”

“They,” Rose corrects. “What are they going to be like.”

“They, then. Who are they going to be?”

“Half-gem, half-human. Or maybe more one than the other. I don’t know.”

“Will they retreat into their gem when they’re hurt?”

“I hope so.”

“Will they have your powers?”

“Maybe.”

“Will they be-- will they be you?”

“I can’t think of anything worse.” 

“Oh, Rose. We both can.”

It’s not said in spite, and when Pearl reaches her hand out to that wet silt at the shoreline, she hears Rose breathe in deep, slow. 

“You’re scared.”

“I'm scared,” Rose agrees. “But I've been scared before. When I took this form. When we called ourselves the crystal gems. Those-- those turned out well, didn’t they?” 

“Yeah,” Pearl says. She thinks they did, honestly, and she thinks of that cracked lapis lazuli placed in her mirror, of the carnelians and jaspers they’ve had to bubble away. She thinks of all the gems still left on homeworld, and with that yearn she never learned to tamp down, she thinks of homeworld itself. 

“Yeah, they turned out okay.”

The froth of the wave crests stay behind after the water’s receded. 

“I'm scared, too. As much as I was back then,” Pearl says. 

“You were scared?”

“Like nothing else.”

The sand shifts around Rose’s bare feet. She never kept her shoes, not like how Pearl slipped those satin ballet flats on her feet every time she reformed. Lovingly. Carefully. 

“I can’t fuse with my child inside of me,” Rose says. “If. If you’d like, Pearl,” (Pearl, only), “I want to be Rainbow Quartz, for the last time.”

Pearl raises her brow, feeling it against the cold rim of her gem. She can be sad, she can wallow, she can be so dreadfully afraid when Rose is not asking this of her, because both of them are buzzing, uncertain, knowing what will unfold and not knowing how, and they can be better together. Rainbow Quartz can be better than they are apart. 

Pearl stands, slow, stretching her form out against the tulle floating around her shoulders. She wonders if she’ll keep it, next time. She reaches out her hand, down to Rose, and asks, “May I have this dance, _madame_?”

Rose takes it, envelops Pearl’s hand in her own and comes up. “Of course, _monsieur_ ,” she says with the same half-trying laughter in her voice. 

Pearl leads her gentle across the beach, both of them stepping from the drying, sea-kissed sand to the ebb and flow of the incoming waves, and Rose follows with her hair flaring out behind both of them. Rose is not hers, Pearl knows. She has never been. Rose is a force of nature, a fierce storm created of her own intent, and she is beautiful, like that. She is blinding, the way she laughs as Pearl twirls her around, as they bring their gems together and meld into each other. 

They are free. They are reckless. They are alive. 

She is alive. 

Rainbow Quartz throws her hair back in the brackish sea breeze, catching all the scattered stars with her four eyes, and she laughs. She stretches her arm back and twirls around and she laughs. 

 

“He said not to watch him sleep, anymore,” Pearl tells Greg, pouring a cup of coffee. She’s stopped breathing so she doesn’t have to deal with the scent of it. “You like yours with a cup of milk?” 

“No!” Greg pulls the coffee out of Pearl’s hands, “No-- here, I can make it. Do you want anything, Pearl?”

“I don’t have a digestive tract.”

Greg stirs the sugar into his coffee, the clink of the spoon against the ceramic mug like music box notes. Greg’s hands still as he pulls it back out. 

The fluorescent lights drone in the quiet, the only sound in the kitchen as Greg drinks. Pearl watches him, the way his eyes close when he takes a sip. His permanent sunburn, persistent through the winter, looks worse now that July has come around. He’s pink as a morganite. 

“I'm sorry,” Pearl tells him. “It wasn’t you who made Rose decide to-- to have Steven. It was her own decision.” 

“It was,” Greg agrees. “I don’t think anything could have made her.”

“No. There’s nothing that could stop Rose from changing. Not a war, not a kingdom. Not a lover.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just like I couldn’t have made her--” Pearl is snapped out of this mourning, this allowance of grief, and her two hands come up harsh against her lips. She’s still not allowed to say, Pearl reminds herself. Still not allowed to speak. 

“Pearl?” Greg asks. His mug comes down with a soft click against the counter. 

Pearl breathes in, deep, that harsh coffee smell and the lingering scent of cinnamon from Steven’s breakfast. She breathes out. 

“It’s fine. Just. Remnants of our homeworld.”

Greg sits back down, still eyeing Pearl. She folds her fingers together and continues. 

“It was Rose who decided to turn into Steven, and I miss her, but I can’t imagine if we didn’t have Steven.”

“No,” Greg agrees. His smile is gentle, clouded around by the wild of his beard, looking up to where Steven’s passed out onto his bed. “He’s a great son.”

And just as Pink Diamond had shed her nobility, her prestige, to become something better, Rose has given herself up, has become something that can change and grow. She has become like her flowers. She has become like the earth.

Pearl wonders if she’s happy, in there. 

 

“Do you have questions?” Pearl asks, coming to sit by Steven. He’s perched with his back to the window, watching the sunset change the light streaming through from golden to hopeful orange to bright, bright red. The house is quiet, again, with Ruby and Sapphire outside flirting on the beach and Amethyst running along the shoreline. “You must have some.”

“Did you love Mom because she was your diamond?” Steven asks.

“No. I loved Rose, not Pink Diamond-- or-- maybe I loved both. But I loved your mother as Rose Quartz, as someone fighting to defend the Earth. I loved her as she was on Earth. I loved how we were together.” Pearl looks down, and places a hand on Steven’s shoulder. “And I love you as you are. I love you as Steven.”

He smiles, easy, but Pearl can feel his shoulders relax.

“This is what your mother wanted, but now it’s about what you want. What you’re going to do.”

“I want this,” Steven tells her. “I want this life on earth, in beach city. I love it.”

Loving is such a heavy thing. Such a heavy, sprawling, hurting thing, and Pearl’s hands come up against her cheek.

“I do, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! 
> 
> I want to note that, as I see it, this is a pretty idealized version of Rose, and Pearl and Rose's relationship, since it's all from Pearl's perspective. 
> 
> If you want to find me, here's my tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/saltwatershell


End file.
